Kiranmayi Indraganti’s book Her Majestic Voice gives us a
broad socio-cultural study of the evolution of South Indian women playback
singers of the mid-twentieth century. The book presents this vast but
relatively unexplored field through the lives and careers of four important
women playback singers, namely: P. Bhanumati, Ravu Balasaraswati Devi, Jikki
Krishnaveni and K. Jamuna Rani, apart from a study of Lata Mangeshkar, whose
career and choices are often set as a benchmark of comparison.
The book deals with rich archival material in the form of
film magazines and reviews, state documents pertaining to films—like the Report
of the Film Enquiry Committee (1951)—and interviews that the author has
conducted with the various protagonists of this book through a period spanning
over a decade. Clearly, this primary material covers a range of registers of
language and aesthetics—bureaucratese, popular reviews and the anecdotal
recollections of the singers themselves. As such, the approach to the field is
varied both in terms of memory and in terms of perspective, and is
comprehensive on the whole as the book offers a vivid picture of the evolution
of the playback singing industry in South India. More specifically, after
sketching the evolution of filmmaking and playback music, the book proceeds to
show how this multilayered evolution enables the rise of women singers from the
periphery of social respectability to the center of the larger process of
film-making and marketing and indeed as a consequence of that, of socio-moral
values itself. This long and chequered journey from social margins to the
cultural center is undertaken on the lives and careers of various women
artists, four of whom are analysed in this book.
While the evolution of female playback singing has been
enabled by several factors including the emergence of respectable subjects in
film, improvements in recording technology, expansion of the market etc., it
has also had numerous complex social paradoxes to tackle along the way. For
instance, the first part of the book establishes rather convincingly how it is
actually the ‘disembodied voice’ of the playback singer that actually allows
her into the mainstream of the production process as well as into the fold of
social respectability which was traditionally denied to the performing women,
whose bodies were sexual entities being offered in the veneer of the art they
practiced. While it does take into account the various enabling factors which
saw the evolution ...